The Corpse Bridge (24 page)

‘I see.'

Grady nodded eagerly as he got into the swing of his sales pitch. ‘We're filling that gap in the market, providing an essential service for prospective house buyers. Come to us and we'll tell you what your future neighbours are like. We're totally independent and objective, too.'

Cooper waited until he'd wound down.

‘You're just a snooper, aren't you?' he said.

Now Grady looked disappointed. ‘That's rather harsh, Detective Sergeant Cooper. Background checks are perfectly common these days in other fields. You can't get a job in teaching or childcare, or work as a volunteer for some charities, without having to go through a Criminal Records Bureau check.'

‘That's true.'

‘The Church of England won't let you do the flower arrangements in your local church without a pass from the CRB. Nobody objects to that. So why shouldn't we gather some basic information about the people we're going to be living next door to?'

‘But what sort of information are you collecting? You're just an ordinary member of the public. You don't have access to criminal records.'

‘Absolutely. That would be illegal.'

‘So?'

‘I'm sure you don't expect me to reveal my methods, Detective Sergeant.'

‘Of course, if we should find during our enquiries that anything you're doing
is
unlawful…'

Grady held up his hands. ‘My conscience is clear. Look, my hands are clear. Do your worst, Detective Sergeant.'

‘So who were you working for when you were asking questions in Taddington recently?'

Grady smiled again and Cooper knew what the answer would be before he spoke. He'd heard it almost as often as ‘no comment' in an interview room.

‘Client confidentiality,' said Grady. ‘I'm sure you understand. We could hardly be giving out that sort of information.'

‘You were specifically asking questions about Mr and Mrs Redfearn of Manor House, Taddington. Mr Redfearn is now the subject of a murder inquiry.'

‘No, I gathered intelligence about a number of residents in that area. If you check, you'll soon be able to confirm that.'

Cooper had no doubt Grady had covered himself in that respect. Whatever else he was, he seemed to be a professional who knew his job. The team in Taddington would find that he'd visited several properties and made a point of asking about neighbours other than the Redfearns. Once he'd collected a snippet of information from one person, he could give the impression he was enquiring about someone else entirely.

Grady must have a special knack that enabled him to get people to talk freely. Cooper wished he knew what that knack was. It definitely wasn't working for him. Perhaps being a police officer didn't help. He ought to suggest to Superintendent Branagh that they might employ Daniel Grady to conduct a training course for detectives in E Division.

‘Will you tell us who your client is?' he asked. It was a futile attempt, but he had to try. There was no way of forcing the information out of Grady.

‘I have lots of clients,' said Grady. ‘Fortunately, business is doing very well, though it's early days. Actually, I hadn't considered working for the police as a consultant, but we could discuss terms if you're interested. You do have my card.'

Cooper looked more closely at the small print at the bottom of the business card.

‘EVE,' he said. ‘You're working for Eden Valley Enquiries.'

‘I'm an associate,' said Grady. ‘I'm establishing a separate division under the EVE corporate umbrella.'

Cooper looked out of the window at the activity in the yards around the farm.

‘Would property enquiries be your only business, sir?' he asked.

‘It's my most recent enterprise,' said Grady cautiously. ‘I do have other interests.'

‘So is this a working farm?'

‘Of course.'

‘You seem to have a lot of employees.'

Grady followed his glance. ‘Not mine. I rent this house from the owner of the farm. I think there's an engineer here to do some repairs on the machinery or something. And I've heard they have a rat problem in some of the fields. The farm manager has organised a few men for a vermin control exercise today. I believe that would explain the dogs and the shotguns.'

‘Yes.'

Cooper was used to seeing dogs and shotguns. He was wondering more about what was in the back of the vans. They had no names written on the sides and their rear windows had been painted over. But he had no justification for checking the vehicles and he couldn't think of a pretext right now. Grady's explanation was perfectly logical.

Outside, Cooper didn't head straight back to the car. He was watching a man with a dark, bushy moustache which drooped in the traditional Mexican style. Cooper felt sure he recognised the moustache, if not the face of the owner. But it took him a few minutes before he was able to make the connection. And no wonder, when the context was so different. The last time he'd seen this man, he was a Confederate soldier.

Cooper had been to a country and western night one Saturday in the social club at Sterndale Moor, just a few miles from here. There had been a shoot-out with .22 air rifles, rebel flags round the dance floor and people dressed as cowboys and US marshals. On stage had been Hank T or Monty Montana, or someone like that. Members of the club performed the American Trilogy, folding the flag and singing ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie' for the South and ‘Glory, Glory' for the North.

Sterndale Moor was an odd place, nothing like Earl Sterndale or any of the other villages in the area. He wouldn't be able to remember the name of the man with the Mexican moustache, but he might be able to find him in Sterndale Moor.

Cooper filed the idea away for future reference as he drove back up the track from Bagshaw Farm and on to Axe Edge Moor.

L
ater that day the Home Office forensic pathologist Doctor Juliana van Doon reported the results of her post-mortem examination on Sandra Blair. And the conclusion wasn't what anyone had expected.

Ben Cooper drove across town to the mortuary as soon as he heard. Yet when he pulled into the car park he saw that Diane Fry's black Audi was already there. She'd arrived before him.

‘Damn,' he said to himself as he parked. ‘Is there no escaping her?'

He hurried into the mortuary. Fortunately, Fry had only just walked through the doors. He caught her up as she walked down the corridor. She turned without surprise at the sound of his footsteps.

‘Ben,' she said.

‘We must stop meeting like this.'

She didn't smile. ‘We might as well hear the results together.'

‘Well, since we're both here…'

Cooper hadn't seen the pathologist for a while. It struck him that she, too, might be getting close to retirement age. For years she'd hardly seemed to change in appearance, but suddenly she was looking older and more tired. The creases had deepened around her eyes and she'd allowed her hair to turn a natural grey. And of course Mrs van Doon barely took the trouble to hide her impatience with irritating police officers who infested her post-mortem room.

The room itself was all polished stainless steel and gleaming tiles, the smell of disinfectant hardly masking the odour of dead flesh and internal organs. The walls echoed strangely whenever someone spoke, as if the faint voices of the dead were answering them.

The pathologist tapped a scalpel thoughtfully against a stainless-steel dish, a familiar habit that seemed to help her focus her thoughts, or perhaps restrain her irritation. The metallic tone reverberated in the room, stilling the ghostly voices for a moment.

‘This individual died of natural causes,' said Mrs van Doon. ‘She suffered a myocardial infarction, causing cardiac arrest. In other words she had a heart attack.'

‘She's not a murder victim, then?' said Fry.

Cooper couldn't tell from her face whether she was disappointed or relieved. He would have given a lot to know which of the two reactions lay behind that controlled expression of hers.

‘It's not for me to say. Well, it's theoretically possible for someone to deliberately cause a heart attack in their victim. But personally I've never heard of such a case. And there's certainly no evidence of it from my examination of this female. Perhaps at the crime scene?'

‘Unfortunately not,' said Cooper.

‘Ah.'

‘The head injury?'

‘Well, it could have been due to an assault. But on the other hand it's also consistent with a fall on to rocks, say.'

‘She was found lying on stones in the river, beneath the bridge.'

The pathologist nodded. ‘Yes, the level of impact would be about the same. There would have been quite a lot of blood. The scalp bleeds heavily, even from a minor laceration. But if she was in the river, I expect the water washed the blood away.'

‘And there was no blood on the bridge itself.'

‘We thought she might have been killed on the bank and pushed into the river,' said Fry. ‘But this would explain why we never found a blood trail.'

‘There are some small lacerations on the hands,' said the pathologist, ‘and one on the left temple. But they wouldn't have bled very much.'

‘On her hands? Defensive injuries, possibly?'

‘Only if someone was attempting to beat her with a bunch of twigs.'

Cooper nodded reluctantly. ‘Scratches from the undergrowth, I suppose.'

‘That's more likely.'

Mrs van Doon pushed back a stray hair from her face. She was still wearing a green apron and a medical mask, but she'd peeled off her gloves. The skin of her hands looked dry, with the faint suggestion of incipient liver spots.

‘So,' she said, ‘otherwise we have a well-nourished Caucasian female. From her physical condition, I would estimate her age to be in the late thirties.'

‘She was thirty-five,' said Fry.

The pathologist raised an eyebrow. ‘Some people do lie about that sort of thing, I believe. Though perhaps she just had a difficult life.'

‘Perhaps.'

‘I've recorded a height of one hundred and sixty-eight centimetres and a weight of seventy-eight kilos. Rather overweight, according to the standard body mass index. But then, aren't we all?'

Cooper thought Mrs van Doon wasn't an ounce overweight – quite the opposite, in fact. And Diane Fry had never been a woman who looked as though she had a good appetite. But he knew better than to comment, or even move a muscle in his face.

‘This individual has never given birth to a child,' said the pathologist. ‘Apart from the signs of coronary heart disease, which she ought really to have been aware of, she was in reasonable physical condition. She probably had a poor diet and an unhealthy lifestyle. It's an old story. And that's all I can tell you really, apart from…'

‘What?'

She looked from Cooper to Fry and back again, perhaps trying to work out which of them she ought to be reporting the information to. She compromised by looking away, her eyes resting instead on the still, sheeted form of Sandra Blair.

‘Well, when we did the toxicology tests,' said the pathologist, ‘it transpired that this female had substantial amounts of cannabis and alcohol in her blood. It's impossible to say for certain, of course – but in my opinion they might have contributed to her death.'

L
uke Irvine and Becky Hurst looked as though they might have been having one of their disagreements. They knew better than to argue when their DS was in the office, but they got on each other's nerves too much to hide it sometimes. Gavin Murfin was lurking in the background, pretending to hear nothing, wrapped up in his world, probably thinking about the next meal break.

‘That's a shock. You don't think of women in their thirties having heart attacks, do you?' said Irvine, when Cooper delivered the post-mortem results on Sandra Blair.

‘It depends on what she had to put up with during her life,' said Hurst with a sharp look.

Irvine shrugged. ‘Well, she didn't have any children or anything.'

‘It wasn't children I was thinking of.'

Cooper intervened. ‘If she had heart disease, it was probably hereditary,' he said. ‘It seems academic now anyway.'

He looked round for Murfin, who seemed to have been spending a lot of time on the phone in the last couple of days. Cooper wasn't even sure it was anything to do with his job. And it wasn't like Gavin to be so shy and reticent.

‘Anything from you, Gavin?' said Cooper.

Murfin reluctantly heaved himself out of his chair and came forward with his notebook.

‘Yes, house to house enquiries have picked up some sightings of Sandra Blair on the day she died,' he said.

‘Really? Share them with us, then.'

Murfin flipped back a page or two. ‘After she left work at the Hartdale tea rooms, she was seen near the cheese factory in Hartington, though we can't confirm whether she called in any of the shops in the village. Later that afternoon she was seen again, this time a few miles away in Longnor General Stores buying a copy of the
Leek Post and Times
.' He looked up, with a ghost of a smile. ‘That snippet is thanks to our friends across the border in Staffordshire.'

‘Cross-border cooperation working then, Gavin?'

‘Up to a point.'

‘Longnor?' said Irvine. ‘How would she get there?'

‘It isn't far from her home in Crowdecote,' said Cooper. ‘Less than a mile, I should think. She could easily have walked there and been picked up in Longnor.'

‘But by who?'

‘That's something I'd like to know.'

M
aureen Mackinnon had arrived from Dunfermline and confirmed the identity of her sister. Though she'd been interviewed, Mrs Mackinnon had been unable to offer any particularly useful information. She could only describe Sandra's interest in a wide range of activities since the death of her husband Gary five years ago.